Student Workaholism

It’s been bothering me a little lately that some people have been describing me as a workaholic, I think that university effectively rewards workaholism and in the real world it’s easier to avoid. Here are a list of reasons I’ve come up with (feel free to suggest more!):

• No distinction between work place and home place, since home is where you work some, if not all, of the time.
• Ditto work time, even people on flexi-time often have set hours in the middle of the day where they’re expected to be working. This is not the case for students.
• The demarcation between your job and extra curricular activities is fuzzy when you’re a student – i.e. volunteering is in a sense part of your studies, as is the part-time job you do to fund them.
• Students are rewarded for perfectionism.
• Studying is infinite – as you will never know everything.
• Students talk a lot about how much work they’re doing, mostly they’re not doing that much (takes a while to figure this out though) which can skew an individual’s perception of how much they should be doing.
• The organization of the semester, with little work at the beginning and lots at the end, is inefficient.
• Feedback is typically limited to letter grades, which do not provide a full picture of work and achievement.
• Students are sometimes encouraged to manage their time badly through pointless assignments and irrelevant reading.
• Most time management advice for students seems to consist of “don’t procrastinate”.
• Businesses have incentives to provide tools to increase efficiency, university’s don’t have incentives, and rarely seem to educate students on tools that will help them work more effectively (for a list of tools I think are useful, see this post).